Utah’s football season opener against Arizona is still two weeks away. However, the Utes have a very important date beforehand — their second and final camp scrimmage at Rice-Eccles Stadium Saturday.
“We want to be cleaner than last week,” said Utah coach Kyle Whittingham, who added that the main objective is to see progress — not that the first outing was bad. “But we just have to get better and that’s really across the board. There’s no one specific area of concern. We just need to get better as a whole football team. Execute better on offense. Tackle better on defense. Just do everything, all the basics better than what we saw last week.”
The coaches, he continued, would also like to have more separation at some positions. That includes quarterback, where mum is the word when it comes to the competition between Jake Bentley, Cam Rising and Drew Lisk. Whittingham has no plans to make any early announcements as to a starter, but primary reps have gone to just two of the quarterbacks since last week’s scrimmage.
More separation is sought Saturday.
“But if we have two really good ones then we’ll have a tough decision to make. I don’t see a platoon situation,” Whittingham said. “And so we’re just going to see how it plays out. We’ve still got, what, 12 more practices before we play or something like that. So we’ve got some opportunity. But we’ve got to get it down to one and that will most likely be in place Monday next week.
“If we feel we need a few more days to look at them both on equal footing then we’ll do that. But I would say no later than Wednesday or Thursday, that would be the drop dead time when we need to get it completely finalized and then go from there.”